It’s that time of the year again: cherry blossoms are blooming.

In Brussels we’re lucky to have several varieties of blossom trees: some blooming earlier then others. So we have a large time lapse to go sketching.

I went sketching last weekend and my darling husband made a video. We’re still no video-professionals, so please excuse me for some of the gaps in the sequence…

I wasn’t also very comfortable with my chair and my material on the floor. Urbansketching is also an adventure to find the perfect art supplies! Art supplies are always a big discussion in the sketch crawls.

In the video I use to following:

• a palette with several varieties of pink watercolours: they’re Holbein, Schmincke and Winsor&Newton pinks. Holbein is a japanese brand and they have cherry blossom pink 😀 . I made this palette because I find it’s difficult to make nice pink mixtures myself
• a pocket palette filled with several colours: burnt sienna, potter’s pink, raw umber, yellow, orange, red, Titanium buff, ceruleum, some greens: sap green, green earth and sea green, turquoise, ultramarine blue and a grey I mixed from Ultramarine blue and orange
• some brushes I explain in the video : japanese brushes, Winsor & Newton sable hair and Rosemary & Co sable hair
• a pencil of Viarco watersoluble graphite for the tree
• a fine ballpoint pen to draw the houses
• All on a A4-sized watercolour Moleskine sketchbook

In the video I do something I don’t usually do when I sketch: I start with watercolouring the cherry blossoms. Usually I draw first. But in the case of the cherry blossoms not, because it makes the tree lighter. If I draw first I will draw all the branches and then I tend to forget to leave white space for the blossoms which hide parts of the branches…

I organize 2 workshop sessions “Simply Draw & Paint it: Urbansketching on the right side of the brain” to go and paint cherry blossoms: on 21 and 28th april. You can find them here: http://barbaraluel.com/myshop/

• In this workshop we will exercise how to look in a creative way at an urban scene and sketch in a relaxed way what we see, avoiding overwhelm and allowing each participant to search for his own “handdrawing”. At the end of the session each participant will have experienced and researched a way of finding his own drawing style. This workshop is based on the method “drawing from the right side of the brain” by Betty Edwards and is especially meant for beginners. A lot of beginning sketchers feel uncomfortable with their drawing skills or overwhelmed by the environment to draw and don’t know where to start. This can cause a lot of stress and sometimes even takes away the joy of sketching and the monkey in their head sometimes even starts saying that they don’t have a “gift” to draw well. I developed some exercises to make drawing more accessible and to make progress in drawing more effective and joyful and to take away the fear of making a “bad” drawing.
• The workshop is not only for beginners. Sketchers who want to experience another way of sketching are welcome as well.
• I will do step by step demo and explain. 

I hope you enjoy the video. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions in the comments below or to share your own experiences. We like to learn from eachother !

Happy sketching!